Hans Rosling, known for some of his famous TED Talks, here tries a little augmented reality with his animated charts showing life expectancy and wealth all over the world for the last 200 years. 120,000 data visualized in this 4 minute video clip from his The Joy of Stats documentary for the BBC.

Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

Moviebarcodes is a tumblr blog from an unknown author that posts these images generated from different movies. Each frame of the movie is stretched tall and thin to create this single image from an entire movie. The one above is from The Matrix, and you can see the green tint they used every time they were “in the Matrix”.

The person behind MovieBarcode, who wouldn’t reveal their identity or what they do for a living, told Wired.co.uk that the creative process can take a few hours on the slightly aged machine they are being processed on, “depending on the length of the movie and the quality of the outcome”.

Movies on the blog are chosen “due to the expected result, not for the movies themselves”. Besides colourful movies, the blog author prefers “movies with long shots such as Kubrick, Hitchcock and Weerasethakul, which can result in unique and interesting moviebarcodes”.

Although, some of them don’t seem to reveal anything interesting, a few of these did give some insights into the movie visuals.

They spent a lot of time at sea in Jaws:

The Dark Knight was a very dark, almost colorless movie:

Kung Fu Panda was very colorful:

You can see the time spent in the digital, neon-blue world of TRON (1982):

I love this map of What Is Data Visualization? from Sébastien Pierre, founder of ffunction. It lays out the different aspects of information design, and acts as a fantastic guide to the vocabulary used in the design community.

“Will it be interactive or static? Will it be used as a tool or to illustrate something? Depending on how we position the visualization, it will be more demanding on UI aspects or on visual aspects. Dashboards, online reports and interactive web visualizations need a solid understanding of UI design, while infographics and print reports require a strong foundation of typography, layout and visual communication.”

Part 1 is a cogged wheel showing 50 tasks broken down by discipline. If you print it out you can tear off each cog or mark the little check boxes as you complete each task.

Part 2 is a six month course to teach you how to become an internet marketer whether you’ve done it before or not. Compress the timeline if you’re a workaholic. It also contains a traffic timeline showing the effect certain actions will have on your inbound traffic growth.

Designer Jess Bachman, in partnership with Smarter.org, has accomplished the seemingly impossible. It’s common knowledge that comparing Apples to Oranges is so hard, it just isn’t done. I’m thinking there’s a Nobel prize candidate here… ;)

I’ve done it! Apples to Oranges. They say it shouldn’t be done, that it can’t be done. But using the science and magic if infographics, I have done just that, compared apples to oranges. The results are unsurprisingly surprising. Little did I know that such botanical and culinary inequality existed in this modern age. Prepare to be infographicalized.

Every year, Americans fill out income tax forms and make a payment to the IRS. It’s an important civic duty, but it is also a lot of money. Where does it all go? Using data provided by WhatWePayFor.com, we challenge you to create a data visualization that will make it easier for U.S. citizens to understand how the government spends our tax money.

To help commemorate the 25th birthday of the South by Southwest (SxSW) conference this year, Eloqua teamed up with JESS3 to create this huge circular timeline. Memorable moments and events are described around the outside, while the attendance of the three main conference topics (music, film, interactive) are visualized in the middle. It was so large, i had to drop it into Zoom.it to make it interactive. You can download the high-resolution PDF file here.

we collaborated with design partner JESS3 to produce an infographic, titled “The History of SXSW,” which celebrates the festival’s impact on the cultures of music, film and technology. We also dug up (and visualized) a massive number of did-you-know facts about the epic festival.

SxSW started in 1986 with only 700 people attending, but has exploded in the last few years to draw in over 36,000 people to Austin, TX. This year, SxSW will be held March 11-20.

Thanks to Abby for sending it in, and it was also a very popular post on Mashable.

Blood Simple, by Steven Leckart, is a great article in the recent issue (Dec 2010) of WIRED magazine, and is also available to read online. Three visual designers were challenged to design a better lab report to help make health information more approachable and understandable by patients.

…lab reports don’t have to be unintelligible. With some thought and design-minded thinking, tests can be as informative to patients as they are to physicians. With a little context and color, we can make sense of the numbers. And with a bit more understanding, patients can become participants in their own health.

These designs certainly aren’t perfect, but they very clearly illustrate the point that we should be able to help patients get a better grip around their own health information. The last few decades have seen a tremendous shift in pushing the responsibility of a patient’s health back onto the patient without giving them a better way to understand the information.

We consulted with Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin, physicians at the Dartmouth Medical School Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and experts in communicating data to patients, to make sure the right information gets onto the forms and the irrelevant stuff stays off. And we tapped three exceptional designers to reimagine how this information can be presented—limiting them to one printed page per report. Consider these a proof of concept, a refutation of the argument that ordinary people can’t handle their health (and inspiration, we hope, for the medical establishment).

I really like the Media Wheel for Visualizing Daily Activities from Hill Holiday. The wheel visualizes how people consumer different types of media over the course of a day. For example, DVD/Video is mostly consumed in the evening and Newspaper is mostly consumed in the morning. each slice is a different type of media, and the consumption levels are shown by how bright the colors are at that time of day.

For a media planning project, we needed to find a simple way to illustrate how people in a particular segment engage with different media. After some experimentation, we came up with this “media wheel” chart that summarizes 216 data points from a media spreadsheet.

Read their blog post, they included a good description of how they normalized the data and created the media wheel. They also gave credit to the designer, Eric Fensternheim, which is always nice to see.

The wheel graph itself was built by hand in Adobe Illustrator. Each data point’s value relative to the highest in its row is tied to the corresponding level of color transparency.